


The Education of Tocelyn Mering

by ElizaHiggs



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: F/M, No Smut, References to consensual sex, This time anyway, Wedding Fluff, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-16 00:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14152806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElizaHiggs/pseuds/ElizaHiggs
Summary: Here now again, he is the one who knows things, and she is the one who is ignorant.





	The Education of Tocelyn Mering

**Author's Note:**

> I own none of these characters.

They spend their wedding night at a middling hotel in a middling part of Southampton. He registers them under an assumed name—neither Baine nor Callaghan—on the off chance that her parents have the tenacity to check every hotel in the city. Or to alert the police. Not that there is anything the police or anyone can do about it, now that he is legally her husband.

Her husband—who carries her trunk to their room himself, just as he's always done, and then takes his time inspecting the room, as though from habit, wiping gloved fingers over the mantlepiece and inspecting the curtains for dust. 

The suite is modest, but not offensively so. The main room is themed in a pinkish mauve, the carpet coated with patterns of peonies and roses that glow in the fading light of the late afternoon. The effect strikes her as rather graceful, although she wonders if it might not in fact be gaudy, second-guessing her own taste, as she has so often done these last few days. 

She had offered to pawn her jewelry to pay for their passage, but he had insisted on paying their way from his own savings, which she supposed was a point of masculine pride, though it's an emotion she has only ever encountered in novels. Her own father and poor, dear Terrance had never seemed to view money as anything more than an occasional nuisance. 

And he seems so terribly full of pride, this man who holds himself with such dignity—a forbearance that had gotten under her skin. And so she had responded with contempt, treated him as though he were so utterly beneath her—a state of the world that went unchallenged, right up until that moment in the cathedral when she had sensed the possibility that he might know things that she did not, an inkling later confirmed on the train where he had taken command in a way that she had seen no one, man or woman, ever do before.

"Are you hungry?" 

His voice makes her jump, and she realizes that she has been engrossed in the carpet patterns and not seen him come to stand before her. She shakes her head. They haven't eaten since the light lunch they took on the train after the ceremony, but her stomach is turning itself over and over.

"Very well." He's fiddling with the buttons on his gentlemens gloves. He slides one glove off, then the other. Folds them neatly, places them on top the steamer trunk. "It's early yet."

"I'm tired," she announces, and his eyes snap to hers, attentive. That isn't, quite, what she meant to say, but she has no idea how to say what she means. 

He takes a step towards her nevertheless. "Very well," he says again, and takes her right hand in both of his and begins to undo the buttons on her own gloves. Her skin heats, like it did when he kissed her in the river, when she realizes that he is _undressing_ her, and her mind fumbles for some protest as she watches him fold her own glove atop his own. When the left glove has joined its mate, he lifts her wrist to his mouth and kisses the thin skin on the underside.

It's too much. She twists her wrist out of his grasp and turns, but she stops halfway to the bathroom of the little suite. She wants him to come after her—grab her—kiss her. She wants him to turn down the bed like her butler and bid her goodnight and leave her be. She wants and can’t ask. It takes her a few moments to recognize the emotion as humiliation.

Here now again, he is the one who knows things, and she is the one who is ignorant. 

"Tossie." His voice is gentle, but the sound of her given name on his lips sounds absurdly aggressive. She has no claim to the title of 'Miss,' anymore. Would he call her Mrs. Callaghan, if she asked? 

She turns back to him. His eyes don’t quite meet hers. "Have you been taught anything of how men and women make love, Tossie?"

Of course he would put the question so directly, so indelicately. No doubt he's read all about it in a book. _Lovemaking and Its Explanations for the Ignorant and Stupid_. 

Her silence coalesces like a jell between them. Of course she hasn't been taught anything about men and women. She forfeited whatever advantage her mother might have offered her when she eloped with him.

He looks down at the floor, as though resigned, and her embarrassment flares into anger. 

“I know—some things. I am not a complete innocent.” Her voice is haughty, her chin lifted through her embarrassment.

He steps towards her again, and this time she manages to hold her ground. She doesn't even tremble when he lifts a hand towards her face.

She commands her voice to be steady. “Though no doubt you will find me highly undereducated.” 

His hand pauses an inch from her cheek. “Love isn’t something you can learn, Tossie.” He lets the hand fall to his side again. “Not a thing one can study. You could read every book in the world on the subject and still not really understand.” He drops her gaze, looks down at the carpet, and she seizes the opportunity to study his face. He rubs a hand over his jaw, which is rough, because he hadn’t had time to shave this morning. 

“Then how did you learn?”

His eyes meet hers. “Years ago. Before I left Ireland.”

She’d said how, not when, but when she opens her mouth to repeat the question his hand is back, and this time his thumb finds its way to her lower lip. She resists the impulse to shiver and wonders how long he’ll make her wait before he kisses her. 

“It’s a thing learned by feel," he says. As if to prove the point, the thumb traces itself along her lip, sweeping past her jawline until his hand slides up into her hair. His fingers are cool against her burning scalp. “May I kiss you?”

She _harrumphs_ , in what she hopes is a derisive manner, although she isn't at all sure how anything comes out, anymore. “You needn't ask. It isn't romantic.”

“I do.” The fingers tighten slightly in her hair, and he looks at her seriously. "How else am I to know what you want?"

“You didn’t before.” In the river, after he had thrown her in. After he had held out his hand and, rather than accept his help to the bank, she had pulled him in after herself. 

“A mistake. Or, at least, a gamble.” His voice is low, almost a whisper, and it’s an incredible sound, a sound she has never before associated with him. “I won’t be another expectation for you to fulfill, Tossie. I want to be the thing you want.”

His hand tilts her head back, and he lowers his head until his forehead touches hers. Her hands come up to his shoulders and her breath shallows out, aware of the way that her inhale compromises the space between their bodies. 

“I do want."

"Want what, Tossie?" He speaks the words softly, cruelly, against her lips, but she doesn't dignify him with a response, and crushes her lips to his instead, grasping for him in a way that she is sure is wanton—classless—aesthetically uneducated. Sure to shock him. 

He doesn't look shocked, though, when she pulls back just far enough to see his face, nor does he ask before he kisses her a second time, and parts her lips beneath his and—goodness—inserts his tongue into her mouth. She is surprised to find that she doesn't mind this at all, and she marvels at the coolness of the sensation before she must come up for breath.

He loosens his hold on her, although she doesn't leave his arms.

"William." She tries out the new name, trisyllabic and awkward on her tongue. She says it to his chest, rather than to his face, firstly because he's so tall and secondly because she's not sure she can look up into his face at the moment. 

He waits patiently, as he has always done, for her to look at him. “Yes, Tossie?”

She tightens the grip she has on his neck, trailing her fingernails through the soft hair at the nape there. His eyes close, and she feels a momentary thrill of power, an authority over his body, at once so familiar and new.

“Teach me to make love, William.” She gives an order, as she has always done. 

His eyes open, and he smiles. “As you wish.”


End file.
